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Advertising Sarcasm at its best or its worst?

Recently, we have seen companies using sarcasm in hidden or obvious words causing a never ending race of ads showing up on media, especially television. This race has taken the shape of a war when it comes to telecom sector. Every telco is hitting others with the gestures, sentences, music, colors or whatever method they find appropriate. The team at Ufone has been doing its part as well but this ad, which is yet to be aired has taken it to another level.

At times I feel it is a little inappropriate but once it’s a war, all is fair in it. Please do post your comments.

Classic games on Palm Pre

Home brewers are hard at work to make classic games on the newly launched Palm pre’s WebOS. A few success stories have been reported, for example, the classic Doom has been ported to Palm. Following videos shows the game on the handset.

If you are a fan of Nintendo games, you can also see Nintendo games running on WebOS too. Is’nt that a good news for game lovers who want to own a Pre? Follow this link to view a tutorial on “How to port Nintendo emulator on WebOS”.

It appears that this porting business is turning out to be much more simpler than expected, especially if you are a Linux user.


Another QWERTY Beauty announced, Nokia E72


Nokia has recently announced its new QWERTY smartphone E-72. The handset is an obvious successor of E-71 with several improvements and performance boosts. A few notable features are A-GPS with Nokia maps, a life time subscription of Walk and a trial of turn by turn navigation, high concentration and convenience on instant messaging services and one touch torch operation by pressing the space bar. The device also uses smart noise cancellation mechanism to make conversations more clear when talking in noisy environments. Navigation has been improved with the addition of a compass and last but not least, an improved version of office is included that supports office 2007 documents as well. According to Nokia, the handset will start shipping in third quarter of 2009, (thats a fortnight away) and will cost around 350 Euro before taxes and subsidies.


Facebook has been Unjust to me!!!

I just posted my brand new Facebook URL in my last post. I’m posting again to launch a protest here. When I tried signing up for facebook.com/basit , it said its already taken. To make sure I dont miss the other combinations, I signed up for /basit.ali and go it.

Now when I try facebook.com/basit, nothing shows up, means its not taken. If the name is not taken, why they dint let me take it? I protest Facebook, I portest!!

Facebook usernames, Basit was taken, so I’m content with basit.ali

Facebook has started giving away usernames so that you can have your public profile placed at www.facebook.com/. A few minuts ago when the signing up opened on first come first serve basis, I thought I’ll get “basit” but that was already taken. Now all my friends can access me through http://www.facebook.com/basit.ali 🙂

Nokia Life tools officially launched in India

Nokia life tools have been running as a pilot in Indian state of Maharashtra. Nokia has announced the commercial launch of these tools in Maharashtra today. This service will run in this state for now and will spread further to the other parts of the country later. Life-tools is a combination of entertainment, information, education and agriculture services in the emerging markets.

The idea is to have applications running on common, low cost phones that is owned by the greater number of users in small towns and remote areas and the focus of the applications is to make the life of the users easier one way or another.

Here are a few shots from the agriculture related application. You can have more information about these applications here.

The biggest challenge in such cases is to bring information and updates to the users from the very local market and the changes should reflect the happenings around them, for example market prices, weather, irrigation related details etc.

That is why the service has been launched in a limited area, and will grow over time. Nokia has recently been concentrating on these so-called emerging markets like India and Pakistan where the telecom market has been growing exponentially resulting in very high sales of handsets.


Google Chrome – Global Video project

It was great to see the global Gmail video last year. Gmail users and fans around the world submitted their video clippings with Gmail envelop icon traveling from one place to another. The result was an amazing sequence (see the video at the end of the post).

Today, Google announced a similar project requesting fans and users to make Google Chrome’s icon using whatever material they find, whatever items they can gather and submit their clips and more creative and interesting ones will make it to the final sequence of clips making the Global Chrome Video.

Here’s how it all starts:

So hurry up. Submit your videos before 22nd June.

Here’s the Gmail’s last year video for those who did’nt get a chance to see the final version.

Dance-Fabulous – N-Gage + Music (store)

Nokia has launched “Dance Fabulous”, a new-game on their N-Gage gaming platform. The game uses both N-Gage and Nokia Music Store’s services to make it happen. This is a very interesting combination. It will not only interest game enthusiasts but music and dance lovers as well and its a great idea to boost sales on both N-Gage and Nokia music stores.

The game allows you to control a character on the dance floor and with your key-press combinations, you make the dancer make the moves. This is a really cool, fun application. The great part is, that you are dancing to the rhythm of the songs that you have in your own music library. Initially I thought its a crazy game, but later I found out that its simply packed with fun.

The game is available both in the available games section within N-Gage application and the game website. But when I tried to download it, it forced me to upgrade my N-Gage software from 1.00 to 1.20. N-Gage upgrade was around 11MB of a download.

After the upgrade, I downloaded the trial game and the download was smooth as usual. The game launches and following are a few screenshots from the trial version

As I said, game is really addicting and even in demo-mode its fun big-time. See a few dance moves below 🙂

As you can see in above screen shots, the game encourages you if you are going in a rhythm and awards you with the stars and it also criticizes you if you are going wrong somewhere.

The came costs $3.99 to purchase and once you have the paid version, you have a bundle of options available as listed in the screen shots below.

When I visited the game’s website I was happy to see a free 30-day pass but the game I downloaded from there appeared to be a demo as well. Moreover, the SMS sent to my number never reached 🙁

If the free pass works for somebody, please do post your comment here.

Google wants you to teach their translation-engine!

Google’s translation page has been my favorite after altavista and other older tools when it comes to translating pages and content. This is fast easy and convenient, but the results at times are not as correct as you expect. The human factor is missing and the results are not compliant with the norms of the language you translate into. At times the message gets translated, but the feel of the sentence or paragraph is not there.

How do you add a human touch to Google translation?

Google has launched Google Translator Toolkit to add this human touch to the automated translation. The idea is necessarily same as what Facebook did for its own site translation. Ask the users out there to help translate the site. But this time, its not about translating the labels, but its translating the whole web.

How it works
1. You select an article from Wikipedia (as their preferred set of pages) or simply enter a URL (any paeg on the web.
2. Translate the page using the Google translate engine
3. Now the toolkit shows the original and translated page side by side. The human translator can edit the automated translation to make it perfect.

These changes will help Google Translator engine learn the translation norms from the Human translators. The tranlation engine will then adopt these techniques when somebody translates the article later.